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Patenting is often seen as the 'be all and end all' of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) or, put another way, the daddy of all IPRs! Strangely enough, however, for an industry which is at the cutting edge of development, pushing the boundaries of intelligence and entertainment and allowing scientific discoveries never thought possible, few software technologies benefit from patent protection. Instead, software is usually protected only by copyright, IPR developed originally for works of art and literature, and by keeping code confidential.

In fact, the UK patent office shows 2,321 patents granted which include 'computer' in the title. These Guidelines set out how patent protection is obtained and the problems specific to computer software, and consider if the patent protection is worth much anyway!

The issue is not purely academic. There is a considerable body of opinion that believes that software patents should not be granted at all, and the debate still rages in the US with some ferocity. In Europe, at one stage, it appeared that the restrictions would be taken away by EU legislation for the Community Patent and a draft Computer Implemented Inventions Directive, but the failure to agree key parts of the proposals meant that they have been dropped, with little prospect of being revived. Nevertheless, patent applications for computer-based inventions have the highest growth rate among all patent categories presented to the European Patent Office (EPO) over recent years.

In addition, the Guidelines also look at the protection available for software today and evaluate the merits of patent protection against other rights available for computer software.

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